Tuesday, September 17, 2013

The Earth Matters blog of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Arts published an article by Charles Okereke, titled 'Earth, a Dying World?'. The article uses images from the Unseen World's 'Planeterium' sub-series to illustrate and question the state of the earth and man's role in restoring and rejuvenating the earth.

Read an excerpt below:

Guest Voices: Charles Okereke

Today’s guest post comes to
us from photographer Charles Okereke. Based in Nigeria, Okereke’s work, Once in a Blue World was featured in the Earth Matters exhibition.
Charles was also featured earlier on our blog... Now Okereke comes to us with
his own words and meditations on his powerful and personal,
world-conscious photographs. Be sure to visit Okereke’s blog for more
works of art and news about this renowned photographer
at charles-okereke.blogspot.com/.

Earth, a Dying World?

by

Charles Okereke

The Earth was made as a dwelling place for all creatures, which also includes man.

Of all the creatures dwelling therein, Man is the destroyer when he
was otherwise crowned with sovereignty. This arrogant attitude indicates
an excess of self-worth, and has made man a plunderer rather than a
nurturer.

Human beings are the only creatures that have set rules apart for
themselves and refuse to conform to laws that guide creation’s movement
and sustenance. Man is similarly the only creature that is out of tune
with the eco-system and plagued with a one-sided narrow intellectual
outlook.

What is sensed and termed as catastrophes globally today are but a
retroactive consequence of a misalignment of the forces of nature –
mankind so to speak, has dug its own grave, like dying Worlds.

Hdramhindra Blasted (2010)

This period of recompense will be felt globally in every facet of
human endeavor, not only environmentally or climatically. But it will
likewise reflect in socio-political affairs, which can already be
surmised in the upheavals that are perennial occurrences today.

Man has been living in an exclusively selfish mentality, devoid of
the understanding of the powers which he uses daily, ignoring nature’s
principles and adjusting thereby. Economic affairs are collapsing;
nations are in conflict, and there is uprising everywhere.

Dis-integration Cameo (2010)

These are visible reverse processes, as the system has to
automatically be put back into orderliness by eliminating the inferior
and the destructive, be they man or animals, worlds and planets,
landscapes and mountains, rivers and oceans, man against man, nations
against nations, economic shifts and the rest of them – all these are
manifestations of the activities of the Lords of the elements, which man
sees as warfare in nature, and perceives one-sidedly as cruel in their
manifestations and activities.

Collapse of Andromeda Emperial (2011)

Even in routine designs, we know there is a designer with a purpose
who strives to make his designs adaptable and useful to the original
intention for its creation; how much more for an automatic pulsating
life form like the Earth with her inherent regulatory system. Mankind
can only learn by compulsion and experiences in the coming years to
adapt naturally.

My concern comes from the simple understanding that we are all
connected and a part of the ecosystem, and by my sense of duty to
maintain a healthy and natural world...

Monday, September 9, 2013

Selected works
from Charles Okereke's 'Canal People' Series are now showing at the
Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal as part of the 9th Edition of
the Bamako Photography Encounters touring exhibition tagged 'For a
Sustainable World'.

Red Alert (2009)

Fuelled Tank (2011)

Red Peeping Mermaid (2011)

Our Reflections (2009)

Once a Blue World (2011)

Curators: Michket Krifa and Laura Serani

“For a sustainable world” is the selected theme for this year’s
Bamako Encounters, a theme appropriate to a continent where many
countries are far from reaching the emission levels stipulated under the
Kyoto Agreement and the consequent implications in terms of
environmental policies, economic decisions, defending the environment,
regulating agriculture, fishing and industrial production. Dozens of
photographers responded to the challenge set and bore witness to a world
demanding drastic solutions.

For more information, visit Gulbenkian Museum's website here.Find out more about Recontres Bamako: For A Sustainable Worldhere

Earth Matters, the blog for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art's "Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa"exhibition featured Charles Okereke in August 2013. Read an excerpt from the post below:

Earth Matters Around the Web: Charles Okereke

Today’s post will feature Nigerian born artist Charles Okereke, one of the artists featured on theEarth Matter’s
exhibition. Okereke works with different media ranging from
photography, video and sculpture. He also writes, acts and directs
plays and drama pieces.

About "Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa"

With approximately 100 diverse works of art, as well as, for the first
time at the Smithsonian, three works of land art in the Smithsonian’s
historic Enid A. Haupt Garden, Earth Matters will be on exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art from April 22nd, 2013 through January 5th, 2014. (For more info, visit http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/earthmatters/index.html.)

Featuring artworks from ca. 1800 to the contemporary moment, Earth Matters explores
the direct, profound, and visually mediated relationship between
individuals and communities and the land upon which they live, work, and
frame their days. The issues that define our era – territorial dispute,
environmentalism – have at their heart the human relationship to the
earth.

Visit the website of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art here.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Charles Okereke's 'Merged(2010)' from the Homecoming Series is featured as the headliner in the New York Times' review of current exhibition "Go-slow: Diaries of Personal and Collective Stagnation in Lagos" at Skoto Gallery, New York, USA (May-August 2013). A version of the review appeared in print on July 5, 2013, on page C23 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Go-Slow’: ‘Diaries of Personal and Collective Stagnation in Lagos’.Read the review below (culled from the New York Times website)

‘Go-Slow’: ‘Diaries of Personal and Collective Stagnation in Lagos’

'Merged' Charles Okereke

Skoto Gallery

“Go-Slow” features the work of contemporary Nigerian photographers, like Charles Okereke.

Published: July 4, 2013

529 West 20th Street, fifth floor, Chelsea

Through July 31

No one views Africa more critically than Africans. And the young curator
Amber Croyle acknowledges this fact in taking Fela Kuti’s satirical
1978 song “Go-Slow,” with its propulsive but not-going-anywhere rhythm,
as the title for this show of 10 contemporary Nigerian photographers
who capture life in their country, where high energy and tension meet.

In Lagos, the largest city, traffic halts movement for hours, as
suggested by Uche Okpa-Iroha’s pictures of public buses seemingly piled
up, back to back. Sidewalks are crowded too, with everyday people like
those in Ade Adekola’s solarized street portraits, and walls thick with
the kind of advertisements against which Abraham Oghobase photographs
himself. In a series called “No Hurry,” Chriss Nwobu, founder of the
Nigerian photo agency Ikollo, distills urban drive and stasis in studio
still lifes: a briefcase perched on a detached car tire, dozens of
slippers and shoes lined up heel to toe.

Other work touches on destructive forms of stagnation: drought resulting
from global warming in Adeniyi Odeleye’s 2010 “Shifting Realities
Series” and the continuing devastation of Nigeria’s oil fields in
Aderemi Adegbite’s 2013 “Medicine After Death Suite.” Staged tableaus by
Uche James Iroha — a founding member of the Depth of Field collective —
dramatize the lingering suppressions of colonialism. Adeola Olagunju
photographs herself among rusting trains and abandoned factories, relics
of a revolution that hasn’t happened.

But sometimes slow means contemplative, as it does in Akintunde
Akinleye’s shots of a clouded-over city, and Charles Okereke’s figures
under a sunset sky. As it happens, the Lagos-based Mr. Okereke, along
with Mr. Okpa-Iroha and Mr. Nwobu, is a member of the forward-looking
collective Invisible Borders: Trans-African Photography Project, which
travels by car across Africa, gradually creating a grand continental
portrait as the present turns into the future. Its ambitious
undertaking, and many others like it, are another side of the Lagos
picture.

African Masters is a 6-part programme on the Africa Channel which visits studios in Senegal, galleries in New York,
artists residences in Nigeria and auction houses in London to reveal how
the African art scene is emerging as a dynamic force internationally.

To watch Charles Okereke's interview in the 'African Masters' series, watch The Africa Channel on Sky channel 209 and Virgin channel 828 across
the UK and Ireland or visit The Africa Channel.

Charles Okereke's 'Unseen World' series and Mirror from the 'Canal People' series are featured in "Art Cities of the Future: 21st-Century Avant-Gardes [Hardcover], Antawan I. Byrd, Reid Shier (2013)". The book will be released on September 23, 2013.

The contemporary art world is increasingly global, with a larger
population, wider territory, and greater number of nationalities than
ever before. Its prevailing conversation, however, has yet to catch up. Art Cities of the Future: 21st Century Avant-Gardes
uncovers twelve distinct avant-gardes that have surfaced in recent
decades, exploring their artistic heritage, cultural climate, and
contemporary milieu.

The book's format is simple: for each of the
twelve cities - Beirut, Bogotá, Cluj, Delhi, Istanbul, Johannesburg,
Lagos, San Juan, São Paulo, Seoul, Singapore and Vancouver - a curator
selected eight artists to represent the contemporary avant-garde. Though
the artists work in a variety of media, including photography,
painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance art, all share
two distinct qualities: a commitment to experimental art and a
dedication to their local landscape.

Lively, thought-provoking, comprehensive, and packed with more than 500 images, Art Cities of the Future
is sure to widen the historical narrative, allowing us to imagine a
future of diverse aesthetics and shared concerns in the common language
of contemporary art.

Charles Okereke: Creating Awareness With Art

Charles Okereke is a photographer and artist born in Nigeria in 1966.
His work has been exhibited at different venues and festivals in
Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Spain and Switzerland. A recent display of his
in Manchester, UK called The Canal People raises questions about environmental issues in Nigeria and more broadly in our global world.

Q: Charles, can you please introduce yourself and tell us your personal story with photography?

A: My name is Charles Okereke, and I am an artist. For me,
photography is all about perception. The camera and lens are an
appendage to our eyes, an extension so to speak, used to freeze moments.
These captured moments are imbued with nuances. And within the same
fragments, harbor much cognitive energy that could be incisive and
impactful years to come or can still influence contemporary happenings
and give it a direction.The explosion of the digital world has increased the hybrid of artist
and enthusiasts alike in this category. It has revolutionized visual
storytelling. Ideas are explored quickly with a certainty of accuracy
and with minimal constraints. I use photography to record personal
agitations. The artist is constantly influenced by his immediate
surroundings, either in a positive or negative manner, and this can
sometimes be a painful experience. The artist is constantly influenced
by these vibrations, which he receives from the ethers of his
environment, and simultaneously transforms them back to the society as a
perceived and translated energy through his works. My photography tries
to recreate the impulses that constantly assault my vision. Not only
through a deliberate and conscious arrangement of forms, but also guided
by an intuitive discovery of recognizable patterns that constantly wet
my appetite for archival imagery.

Q: Let’s talk about your work The Canal People. What are its origins, its different chapters, and how is this related to your personal concerns?

A: The Canal People series began in 2009. The attraction to
the area I photographed was totally of a nostalgic reminiscence. My
mother comes from one of the coastal delta regions of Southeast Nigeria,
a little town called Oron. Water is of immense influence to the people
of this region. They are deeply rooted to it. Sometimes I find myself
attracted to coastal communities and fishing settlements.

The Canal People was shot in an artificial canal in Festac
Town, Lagos. It is an intercourse of crossbred cultures with ethnic
flavors spiced into rustic modern ghetto lifestyles. The area is a
collective of untapped potentials waiting to be discovered. It’s a
quarter for harlots and the local illicit alcohol (called “paraga”)
centers. This union activates and propels diverse energies, and the
nature is vibrant and stimulates creative signals.

This body of work is divided then into different sub-themes, which
are “architecture”, “people”, “lifestyle” and “the environment”. The
sub-themes are a documentation of the inhabitants of this area. They
expose the idiosyncrasy that these cultural mixtures could give birth
to. The immense level of pollution in our environment is an alarming
issue, and I feel it should be addressed immediately. I am very
concerned with the indiscriminate dumping of refuse on our streets, and
especially the careless disposing of polythene sachet water bags all
over.

The images in this series were ignited by the still life
compositional semblances of floating rubble on the canal’s reflective
surface. I had to create frames in a storyboard like sequence, and also
glamorize the images in highly saturated colors. This gave the images a
contemporary billboards effect.

Q: The text introducing your work in the recent Manchester group exhibition, We face forward. Arts from West Africa Today,
reads: “For this section, Okereke chose a deliberate style of
photography, setting out to simulate the techniques of advertising”. Can
you recall the process that led you to choose this particular esthetic
treatment?

A: The project aesthetically was influenced by the subliminal and
suggestive approach of the advertisement world. I was presenting ideas
of products in lavished, attractive, saturated colorful billboards. The
above excerpt aptly describes the idea. The aim being to create
assumptions of a supposedly marketable product in the captured forms.
Garnished and injected with shock values, laced with hidden innuendos.

Q: Was this a way to address a serious and dramatic issue with a
little bit of irony or to stress right to the end the consumerist
spirals in which our contemporary world is caught up in?

A: Exactly. By imitating the style that advertising agencies use and
glamorizing the images, I was ironically selling back the rubbish as
products.

Q: Previously, you spoke about your “appetite for archival imagery”; can we see tracks of this in this body of work?

A: Yes! Everything is archival in a sense, it depends also on the
intention and purpose of each photographer; either consciously creating
an archived language of works, whereby the works becomes reference point
and a resource material for scholars and historians alike, or merely as
a reinterpretation of ideas in a personalized concept or language.

I work on diverse themes, but mostly on issues that concern the
environment. For me this is more impactful. The consequences are
mounting and yet there is an unimaginable ignorance about elemental
principles and genuine concern for the environment. So for me, this is a
call to create awareness, which propels investigation, creates
agitations that arouse questions.

As a fact, photography can evoke different feelings and raise
people’s consciousness to a cause. It is no accident then, in this
contemporary time, to find the massive explosion of the digital age. It
acts as a balance and counter-poise to the rapidly unfolding events in
the world recently.

Q: In two images of this series a silhouette is visible. Was this a
way to recall that each photograph is a construction allowed by a
particular gaze or maybe a kind of auto-portrait?

A: In the act of documenting the process, the self is absorbed and
becomes a part of the process. Shadows and reflections cast on objects
suggest a sense of an inescapable impending crisis. I also use
human shadows to establish the presence of the perpetrator, man himself,
the mischief maker, giving it a certain realistic grounding and subject
matter.

Q:On your blog we can see some black-and-white photographs from the series The Unseen World.
We see ground-encrusted objects, or parts of what remains. Would it be
correct to say the “scrap” is a very central idea in your photographic
approach? You seem to carry out an “archaeological” research and, more
than the environmental issues raised by The Canal People, seem to
evoke the previous lives of these objects, while their enigmatic
presence are reminiscent of those of humans who bring them.

A: You are right. The concept of the project The Unseen World
is a continuation of the environmental problems. We seem to float more
on illusions and in most cases merely skim the surface of issues. These
are attestations to a world crisis that are more rampant today. It is
lack of an in-depth understanding of far-reaching impacts and the
consequences of our decisions and actions in general terms.

Science has bridged and greatly narrowed gaps which were previously
less predominant in our world’s opinion. An era of global proximity.
Today what affects one part is simultaneously felt as a shock wave
throughout the globe. My gaze this time wandered to the soil and what is
trapped inside her. Imprisoned materials are exposed by surface
erosion, which lent an archaeological semblance to the images, and also a
sense of discovery.

The Unseen World series also came from the same silent
agitations and perceptions of objects around my environment. This
impulse, like all else, was difficult to ignore as they constantly
caught my attention. Yes, there is that sense of fragility and
impermanence in the objects, a reflection of transient time, and also of
a resurrection. They are a reminder of an evolutionary principle, which
is not conscientiously observed by man.The style of shooting was a
close-up, to give it that massiveness, an exaggeration of scale,
conveying a picture of a monumental catastrophe.

Q: What kind of photographic materials did you use to produce these works?

A: Well, I don’t like thinking in the limiting language of equipment.
As an artist, I am not confined to any particular choice of equipment.
For me concepts influence equipment. So my choice of tools can only be
the one that conveys the language of the concept most appropriately. I
can then transition between tools and materials.

Profile

Charles Okereke is a multimedia artist. His philosophy is that life is ever-expansive and the limits are always self imposed. Naturally, we are all very free to explore the vast vistas of existence and for Charles Okereke, as an artist, this is possible.